Best Blog Analytics?
Posted May 14th, 2009 by RickBurnes
What are the best ways to measure the success of a business blog? Is there anything beside page views and visitors that I should be tracking?
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What are the best ways to measure the success of a business blog? Is there anything beside page views and visitors that I should be tracking?
Lots of ways to measure!
Mike Volpe 2 years 48 weeks 3 days 23 hours ago
There are a number of ways to measure the value of your blog content.
- Subscribers (RSS and email)
- Visitors to website
- Comments
- Inbound links (good for SEO, measure both for each article and the blog as a whole)
- Keyword rankings (SEO)
- Leads
You might enjoy this webinar. it has a section on measurement at the end: http://www.hubspot.com/archive/blog-webinar
5 Ways to Measure Your Blog Success
Prashant Kaw 2 years 48 weeks 3 days 13 hours ago
Here's another article on blog measurement everyone might find helpful:
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4784/5-Ways-to-Measure-the-S...
Measuring with time
Dave Lowe 2 years 48 weeks 4 days 19 hours ago
I think an often overlooked aspect of analytics is time spent on pages. If viewers spend a ton of time on the home page, or particularly a specific blog post or area, you know they are engaged. You can use that information to develop more of the same content or to focus your attention on comment discussion.
Reach, Comments, Inbound Links and Conversion
Prashant Kaw 3 years 5 days 10 hours 21 min ago
Besides raw growth of visitors / RSS subscribers I like to look at the following:
1. Comments: It gives you a sense of engagement and a little more qualitative flavor on various blog posts
2. Inbound Links: Like academic papers being cited, inbound links is the measure of a good blog post or blog.
3. Conversion: While the nature of blogging is to keep your information helpful and non-salesy, I think it is vital for businesses to provide relevant calls-to-action that will help convert blog visitors to main website visitors and eventually leads. Tracking that is important.
I agree!
Rebecca Corliss 2 years 52 weeks 19 hours 36 min ago
Number 3 is especially a great way to think of how your bringing business value to your company with your blog. Too many people measure the value of a blog by counting eyeballs. Eyeballs don't help your company grow!
Actually, I would say the
Brian Rogers 3 years 6 days 22 hours 37 min ago
Actually, I would say the most important thing to measure with blogs are your subscribers, then visitors and page views. The reason is that a subscriber is someone who made the concious decision to regularly read your content. So, if your subscriber base is growing, that means you're getting a lot of people who like what you say. If it isn't growing, then look at your traffic. If you're getting a lot of traffic but no subscriptions, then I would recommend trying to vary the content some to get these visitors subscribing. You could post a form asking people to submit ideas and suggestions for you to write on. Lets say instead you weren't getting a lot of traffic or subscribers, then you should work on generating more traffic before altering the content. Either way, you're looking at the subscriber count first and then deciding what to do next based on traffic numbers.
Another reason why subscribers are very important is that this group of people will start doing a lot of the engagement work for you. What I mean by this is if you have 100 subscribers, when you publish something, they are the ones who are likely to pass this info onto their friends, post a link in their blog, make a twitter post to their community saying they love this new articles, etc. So, by building your subscriber base, you are vastly increasing your reach.
Other metrics that are important to measure would be links and comments. The articles that got the most links and comments are the ones w/ the content your audience likes. So, determining what they like and then writing more content of that nature is an important part of the blogging process.
~Brian